tty still living?"

"Oh, no! she died long ago. A few weeks since a grandson of hers was
here with me. But isn't it strange that my first youthful love--I was
hardly ten years old--should have awakened in me? And she had an apple
in her hand, and bit into it, and then said, 'Take a bite too;' but,
when I wanted to take the apple, she wouldn't let me, and said, 'Don't
bite too much.' And, when I awoke, the taste of the apple seemed still
in my mouth. Now it just comes back to me that we were once painted
together. The painter declared that it would please us very much some
time or other. He did it secretly, and, of course, the picture was
bought of him; I believe it is still in existence; but I don't know
where. Don't you like her name of Hatty? She is a half-grown girl in a
pink calico dress and white apron, and that's the way she was always
dressed, and she had a broad Florence straw hat, whose brim drooped
down upon her shoulders." So Clodwig went on, and said with a repressed
sigh, "Bella has never cared to hear about my youth;" but then, as if
not wishing to speak of her, he quickly added in a trembling voice,
stretching out both hands, "Now attend, and I can tell you my story. I
have had a very different life from that Herr Sonnenkamp. My father was
Prime-Minister, and I was born in the ministerial residence, the son of
a late marriage, an only son, like Herr Sonnenkamp; but my life was
different. My father became representative of the Confederacy to the
German Diet, and then I often lived here in summer on our estate. The
society of the representatives of the Confederacy,--who knows whether
it is not passing away without any one's having pictured it truly,--I
might have done it; even when I was still a student, it was plain to me
that it was a society which exists only to stand in the way of every
improvement. Come a little nearer and I will tell you what the German
Diet is,--it is the evil conscience of the Princes. I thought so very
early, and I was soon sure of it, and yet I stayed in the midst of it;
and the farther I advanced, the more plainly I saw that it was true.
All progress has built itself up apart from the Diet; and there is
something like it in the Church. Progress is made without her, aside
from her; she has not done away with capital punishment, nor torture,
nor the confinement of prisoners in irons: none of these has she
abolished. And now are coming the two great works of emancipation,--the
emanc